“Hello, Shiel,” he said, remembering her from the night he’d come after Darien’s birth to seek aid. They had barred his way then, demanding blood.
Not now. Shiel flushed at being recognized. She gestured for him to enter. “I know you have given blood,” she said, almost apologetically.
“I’ll do so again, if you like,” he said mildly.
She shook her head vigorously and sent an acolyte scurrying down the curved corridors in search of the High Priestess. Waiting patiently, Paul looked beyond Shiel to his left. He could see the domed chamber and—strategically placed to be visible—the altar stone and the axe.
The acolyte came back, and with her was Jaelle. He had thought he might be kept waiting, or sent for, but she so seldom did what he expected.
“Pwyll,” she said. “I wondered if you would come.” Her voice was cool. “Will you take a glass of wine?”
He nodded and followed her back along the hallway to a room that he remembered. She dismissed the acolyte and closed the door. She went to a sideboard and poured wine for both of them, her motions brisk and impersonal.
She gave him a glass and sank down into a pile of cushions on the floor. He took the chair beside the door. He looked at her: an image of crimson and white. The fires of Dana and the whiteness of the full moon. There was a silver circlet holding back her hair; he remembered picking it up on the plain of Andarien. He remembered her running to where Finn lay.
“This evening, then?” she asked, sipping her wine.
“If you will,” he said. “Is there a difficulty? Because if there—”
“No, no,” she said quickly. “I was only asking. We will do it at moonrise.”
There was a little silence. Broken by Paul’s quiet laughter. “We really are terrible, aren’t we?” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “We never could manage a civil exchange.”
She considered that, not smiling, though his tone had invited it. “That night by the Anor,” she said. “Until I said the wrong thing.”
“You didn’t,” he murmured. “I was just sensitive about power and control. You found a nerve.”
“We’re trained to do that.” She smiled, though, and he realized she was mocking herself a little.
“I did my share of goading,” Paul admitted. “One of the reasons I came was to tell you that a lot of it was reflex. My own defenses. I wanted to say goodbye, and to tell you that I have… a great deal of respect for you.” It was difficult choosing words.
She said nothing, looking back at him, her green eyes clear and bright. Well, he thought, he’d said it. What he’d come to say. He finished his wine and rose to his feet. She did the same.
“I should go,” he said, wanting to be elsewhere before one of them said something that was wounding, and so spoiled even this goodbye. “I’ll see you this evening, I guess.” He turned to the door. “Paul,” she said. “Wait.”
Not Pwyll. Paul. Something stirred like a wind within him. He turned again.
She had not moved. Her hands were crossed in front of her chest, as if she were suddenly cold in the midst of summer.
“Are you really going to leave me?” Jaelle asked, in a voice so strained he needed a second to be sure of what he’d heard.
And then he was sure, and in that instant the world rocked and shifted within him and around him and everything changed. Something burst in his chest like a dam breaking, a dam that had held back need for so long, that had denied the truth of his heart, even to this moment.
“Oh, my love,” he said.
There seemed to be so much light in the room. He took one step, another; then she was within the circle of his arms and the impossible flame of her hair was about them both. He lowered his mouth and found her own turned up to his kiss. And in that moment he was clear at last. It was all clear. He was in the clear and running like his running pulsebeat, the clear hammer of his heart. He was translucent. Not Lord of the Summer Tree then, but only a mortal man, long denied, long denying himself, touching and touched by love.
She was fire and water to his hands, she was everything he had ever desired. Her fingers were behind his head, laced through his hair, drawing him down to her lips, and she whispered his name over and over and over while she wept.
And so they came together then, at the last, the children of the Goddess and the God.
They subsided among the scattered cushions and she laid her head against his chest, and for a long time they were silent as he ran his fingers ceaselessly through the red fall of her hair and brushed her tears away.
At length she moved so that she lay with her head in his lap, looking up at him. She smiled, a different kind of smile from any he had seen before.
“You would really have gone,” she said. Not a question.
He nodded, still half in a daze, still trembling and incredulous at what had happened to him. “I would have,” he confessed. “I was too afraid.”
She reached up and touched his cheek. “Afraid of this, after all you have done?”
He nodded again. “Of this, perhaps more than anything. When?” he asked. “When did you…?”
Her eyes turned grave. “I fell in love with you on the beach by Taerlindel. When you stood in the waves, speaking to Liranan. But I fought it, of course, for many reasons. You will know them. It didn’t come home to me until you were walking back from Finn to face Galadan.”
He closed his eyes. Opened them. Felt sorrow come over to shadow joy. “Can you do this?” he said. “How may it be allowed? You are what you are.”
She smiled again, and this smile he knew. It was the one he imagined on the face of Dana herself: inward and inscrutable.
She said, “I will die to have you, but I do not think it need happen that way.”
Neatly she rose to her feet. He, too, stood up and saw her go to the door and open it. She murmured something to the acolyte in the corridor and then turned back to him, a light dancing in her eyes.
They waited, not for long. The door opened again, and Leila came in.
Clad in white.
She looked from one of them to the other and then laughed aloud. “Oh, good!” she said. “I thought this might happen.”
Paul felt himself flushing; then he caught Jaelle’s glance and both of them burst out laughing.
“Can you see why she’ll be High Priestess now?” Jaelle asked, smiling. Then, more soberly, added, “From the moment she lifted the axe and survived, Leila was marked by the Goddess to the white of the High Priestess. Dana moves in ways no mortal can understand, nor even the others among the gods. I am High Priestess in name only now. After I sent you through the crossing I was to relinquish my place to Leila.”
Paul nodded. He could see a pattern shaping here, only a glimmering of it, but it seemed to him that the warp and weft of this, followed back to their source, would reach Dun Maura and a sacrifice made on the eve of Maidaladan.
And thinking of that, he found that there were tears in his own eyes. He had to wipe them away, he who had never been able to weep.
He said, “Kim is going home or I would never say this, but I think I know a cottage by a lake, halfway between the Temple and the Tree, where I would like to live. If it pleases you.”
“It pleases me,” Jaelle said quietly. “More than I can tell you. Ysanne’s cottage will bring my life full circle and lay a grief to rest.”
“I guess I’m staying, then,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I guess I’m staying after all.”
She was learning something, Kim realized. Learning it the hardest way. Discovering that the only thing harder for her to deal with than power was its passing away. The Baelrath was gone. She had surrendered it, but before that it had abandoned her. Not since Calor Diman and her refusal there had the Warstone so much as flickered on her hand. So, late last night, quietly, with no one else in the room, no one else to know, she had given it to Aileron.